Novelist and psychiatrist Daniel Mason has won the 2020 Joyce Carol Oates Prize, given to a mid-career author “who has earned a distinguished reputation and the approbation and gratitude of readers.”
Mason is known for his novels The Piano Tuner, A Far Country, and The Winter Soldier. His latest book, the short story collection A Registry of My Passage Upon the Earth, was published last week.
Joseph Di Prisco, the chair of the Simpson Literary Project, which awards the prize, called Mason “a transporting writer of prodigious imagination and power.”
In a news release, Di Priscio said, “He writes with such immense confidence that readers are invited to take the leap—into the past as well as into themselves. He elegantly represents the Prize’s aspirations, because he is an emerged writer whose prospective, continual emergence promises to be limitless.”
The Joyce Carol Oates Prize was first awarded in 2017, to T. Geronimo Johnson (Welcome to Braggsville). The past two winners were Laila Lalami (The Other Americans) and Anthony Marra (The Tsar of Love and Techno).
The Simpson Literary Project also released a shortlist for this year’s prize. Other contenders included The Great Believersauthor Rebecca Makkai and Maggie Brown Othersauthor Peter Orner.
The finalists receive an honorarium, the Simpson Literary Project, while Mason’s award comes with a $50,000 cash prize.
Michael Schaub is a Texas-based journalist and regular contributor to NPR.
